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I have been in such a guild in most of my WoW "career", where I have been one of the GMs at the majority of the time. For us, it was a lot like lairpie says; very different results between nights. Especially at Naxx we could easily see differences, from the point where we happened to almost 1-shot the entire Spider Wing to where we were progressing again on Anub'Rekhan after having it on farm for weeks.
Like others, our guild also existed between the "90%+ attendance" people and the casuals that log on once in a while. One of our MTs that logged on almost every night and had the best gear of all, had problems with using the mouse and couldn't build aggro really fast (introducing Misdirection in TBC really was gift from heaven for him) or stance-dancing. But since he has been extremely devoted to the game and is a nice guy, we just kept bringing him. There was definetly a big variety of skill and attendance between our members.
Anyway, to get to the point, we never killed C'Thun or Kel'Thuzad for that matter. We downed the five easy bosses in Naxx. We never killed C'Thun because a lot of people, after nights of wiping, still managed to kill other people by standing too close to each other or not walk with Dark Glare etc. It required a perfect execution, something that just was too hard for some people.
It's rather obvious that bringing "casuals" to your raids slows down progress a lot. For progress, we always tried to bring as little casuals as possible. For farm we had a system to make sure everybody had a shot at going. I think the latter was what mostly made us progress as 'slow' as we did, as we had a lot of casuals screwing up our farm raids, leaving little time for actual progress. Also, at progress days, not many people showed up because nobody was very fond of paying big repair bills.
So there was a tension between the "casuals", who weren't as devoted to the game (or raiding), and the people who only wanted to see new bosses and got sick of going through BWL again. Being one of the GMs, I had a lot of people whispering me about raids and giving their opinion about what we "should" do, and the way people perceived our guild was really different between members. Some people saw us as a hardcore raiding guild that should try to progress at all costs, while others saw us more as a friendly and casual raiding guild.
Our guild eventually faltered with the arrival of TBC. Too many of our core quit the game or joined a "friends" guild. We tried recruiting new people, but it had very little success. I think the most important reason for this is the arrival of Karazhan, which only requires 10 people. Every group of friends could create a guild and go venture into Karazhan. So why join us? Eventually we had to invite some really unskilled people as we were lacking mostly healers and I quit the guild. I recently joined a pretty hardcore guild and it immediately became clear that being in a guild that consists out of people with the same mindset as you, raiding becomes a lot less frustrating and efficient. People knowing what they are doing and not screwing up as badly as casuals (in terms of skill) do, is quite the relief.
To answer your question, I don't think a casual/hardcore guild has a big chance on being successful - as in killing Archimonde/Illidan. Getting this far into the game just requires people to really want to go to this boss, pay for pots, repairs, be online and willing to skip farm if it gets in the way of progress. Also for some bosses you just need skill and 1 person screwing up can wipe the entire raid. If you really want to see these endbosses I would personally go to a more hardcore raiding guild like I did, because at least on the servers I play on, those are the only ones that eventually reach them.
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